Category Archives: rhubarb

Late April: Harvesting, Planting, Working on– by Julia Frisbie

by Julia Frisbie

posted April 26, 2022

We just had a glorious sunny weekend, and I spent almost all of it in the garden. There’s always a lot going on in late April. Rather than doing a deep dive on any particular subject, today I’ll share a birds-eye view of what I’ve been harvesting, planting, and working on.

 

HARVESTING: Eggs, asparagus, rhubarb, kale florets, dandelion, raspberry leaves

Every bird in the garden is now laying eggs like crazy, inspired by increasing day-length to amass clutches in creative hidey-holes where they might be able to brood. The result is that every day in April, we get to go on an Easter Egg hunt in the chicken and duck yard. We feast on egg-heavy recipes– frittata, custard, egg salad– and give thanks.

Fresh, raw asparagus is so sumptuous that I never seem to amass enough of it for cooking. Whatever makes it into the kitchen usually gets sliced thinly and added to a salad. It’s unbelievably sweet!

As for rhubarb, the early growth is the tenderest of the year. I harvest just one or two early stalks from each of my rhubarb plants anytime after they’re longer than a foot and thicker than my thumb. It’s not enough for pie at this point, so I make rhubarb scones.

 

Our red russian kale feeds us year-round, and this is the season for each individual plant’s final offerings before going to seed. In April, the kale mamas get ready to flower, and I cut some of the flower stalks before the buds open and prepare them like broccoli (usually by roasting them in a 400 degree oven for just a few minutes until bright green). As long as the individual plant seems healthy and strong, I cut the central flower stalk in order to encourage lateral branching from the base of the plant, which creates both a longer harvest of florets and a larger eventual harvest of seed. This is also the time of year when I completely remove any less vigorous individuals from my backyard kale population so that their pollen doesn’t get added to the mix and influence the next generation.

Dandelions! I don’t grow them on purpose, but here they are, and I’m not sorry. The humans in the household have yet to develop a taste for them. (Please share your recipes in the comment section; I am always game to try again!) I leave lots for the bees as a source of early pollen, but each day in the spring I try to pull at least one dandelion plant up, rip it into small pieces, float it in clean water, and offer it to my ducks. This “dandelion soup” is extremely nutritious, and as we round the bend into the later half of their mating and egg laying season, their bodies are hungry for it. It’s the equivalent of a daily multivitamin, and they relish it.

My raspberry plants have now sent up hundreds of babies in all the wrong places. With help from friends, I’ve sent dozens off to new homes, but I still have a surplus. I harvest some for greenery in spring bouquets with daffodils and tulips, and cut the rest for red raspberry leaf tea. (If you’ve seen me in person recently, you might have some idea why it’s my new beverage of choice!)

 

PLANTING: Tender annuals under cover, Peas, leafy greens, and the first dahlias

Two weeks ago at the farmer’s market we did a soil blocking demonstration, and I started a tray of corn, a tray of cucumbers, a tray of tomatoes, a tray of herbs, and a tray of tender annual flowers. They’re on my heated propagation table right now, and almost everyone has germinated! Only my cucumbers failed to show up to the party, probably because the seed was packed in 2017, so after five years under mediocre storage conditions, it must have come to the end of its viable life. No problem; there’s still plenty of time. This weekend I started another tray of cucumbers with fresh seed to make up for it.

As regular readers will know, so far I’ve only direct-sown peas and leafy greens. (I did put in a row of Olympia spinach according to the instructions that Anna Torgeson left as a comment on the post about planting salad– thank you, Anna!) If you haven’t done yours yet, it’s not too late. At this point I’m hand watering lots of pea and salad seedlings because I haven’t gotten the drip irrigation set up for the year yet.

I planted the first dahlia tubers this past weekend. Most spots are still too cold for this, but if you’re working with raised beds in a favorable microclimate, it might be time. The batch of tubers I did this weekend went into a fluffy, newly-prepared bed against the southern eaves of my neighbor’s house. I told her not to worry about watering them until they emerge from the soil line; otherwise, they might get too damp and rot underground. I’ll probably begin to plant my own dahlia tubers into raised mounds of soil next weekend.

 

WORKING ON: soil prep, paths, irrigation, trellises, pest control

The major task in April is bed prep. Any energy you can invest into good infrastructure in your garden at this stage will pay you back with compound interest later in the season.

The first thing, of course, is weeding. Although I often allow them to flourish in perennial beds, deep rooted perennial or biennial weeds have to be dug out of annual beds, because they’ve got so much energy stored in their roots that they will outcompete seedlings. For example, I’ve been digging out dozens and dozens of dock plants. They’re here to help with excess magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus in my soil, and help loosen compacted subsoil. I thank them as I dig them out of my annual beds. Every root I remove leaves behind a deep and narrow hole that will allow water to drain and air to penetrate the soil. I soothe my aching back by telling myself that the dock removal project serves the same purpose as broadforking and is probably almost as effective.

Once a bed is free of deep-rooted weeds, it’s time to deal with all the little tiny seedlings of annual weeds. Getting around to this in April rather than May means that most can be eliminated just by surface disturbance. As I rake the soil into low mounds according to Peter Heffelfinger’s instructions, I create enough disturbance to wipe out weeds that are at the baby-leaf stage. (Once this year’s beds are fully formed, I won’t rake anymore, so I’ll have to rely on timely flame weeding or untimely manual removal. I’ll do that until the soil is warm enough that I feel like I can add a layer of weed-suppressing arborist wood chip mulch without slowing down the tender annuals’ progress, and then I let my plants fend for themselves for the rest of the season.)

A lot of what I’m doing when I form my garden beds is simply moving topsoil from the areas where I plan to have paths into the areas where I plan to have annual garden beds. In other words, I’m digging out the paths in order to build up the beds. But I don’t want to leave bare subsoil in the paths, because that’s an invitation to more weeds, and it also gets compacted by foot traffic and won’t drain well… in other words, not very cozy. So I add a two- to four-inch layer of arborist mulch into the paths I’ve dug out between garden beds. The channels of mulch act like mini-swales which soak up rainwater like sponges and then slowly release it to the beds adjacent.

Above: the bed is on the right, and the woodchipped path through the perennials is to the left.

After I’ve got beds (and paths) formed, it’s a good time for me to double check my drip irrigation lines, because I’ve just uncovered them with all that weeding and raking. I can fine-tune the system later (usually during Mother’s Day weekend when I’ve requested the gift of unpaid garden labor from my family), so at this stage I just want to make sure that I can see the lines and they’re in the right neighborhood.

Once beds are formed and irrigation lines are visible, we drive in t-posts at each end of any bed that will need a trellis this season. You can use loads of different stuff to make trellises, and different plants have different preferences. For climbing peas and beans, I use hortonova netting because their little tendrils seem to appreciate having thin stuff to grab. For tomatoes and cucumbers, I string some wire between two t-posts and then wind individual vines up to the wire on lengths of twine using a string trellis method.

A few years ago, April and May were months when I hunted slugs and snails at dawn and dusk, collecting and dispatching about a pint of them per day, because otherwise they would eat up all my seedlings. Now, all I do is throw a rogue one or two to the ducks when I come across it. Good job, ducks. Thank you for taking this disgusting chore off my to-do list.

That’s a snapshot of late April in my garden. Leave a comment and tell me what you’re harvesting, planting, and working on in your garden right now! I’m eager to know!

This Week in Gardening (TWIG) — First One of 2021!

By Peter Heffelfinger

Posted March 15, 2021

After a winter of being cooped up during the pandemic, I’m sure gardeners are anxious to get started growing things once again. Before jumping into spring planting, I thought I’d start this year’s edition of weekly updates with a look back over what survived this past winter. Spring will arrive soon enough, if not already here.

The heavy foot of snow that fell on South Fidalgo in February served as a layer of insulation, protected the ground from freezing very deeply and kept the hardy over-wintering plants from exposure to wind. With the rapid melt of the snowfall, and the change to warm and dry weather in early March, we’re experiencing a much earlier spring, as has been happening more and more the past few years.

Perennial Vegetables

Basic to any system of year-round gardening are vegetables that reappear on their own each spring. Although they may initially take up to several years to reach full production, they’re certainly worth the time and effort. The main concern is finding a permanent place in the garden, safely removed from any ongoing system of crop rotation. Once established, perennials take a minimum of care, mostly a little regular weeding, some watering in summer, and regular pruning or cleanup as needed. A layer of well-cured manure or other form of fertilizer applied in the fall serves a source of slow-release nutrition. The appearance each year of a reliable crop is a welcome relief from the usual spring rush to get seeds or transplants in the ground.


Rhubarb

Rhubarb will supply a few leaves the first year, depending on the size of the start, particularly if you are able to find a mature root ball divided from a well-established bed. I found a large rhubarb root at the very first Transition Seed Swap years ago. It is still producing and has filled out a small bed of its own in a corner of the garden, right next to a permanent stand of thornless blackberries. Note: rhubarb leaves get gradually smaller and thinner after 4-5 years and the root needs to be sub-divided to maintain vigorous growth. Rhubarb is one of the earliest crops to be harvested, with the appearance of the bright red stalks serving as a spring tonic visually, as well as for their tart taste, which mixes well with the standard local perennial, strawberries. I am always amazed at the elephantine leaves bursting out of the ground. If large skunk cabbage leaves are a first sign of spring in the woodlands, then rhubarb is the starting flag for the garden.

Artichokes

Artichoke plants will offer an edible head or two the first year, but will start to take off the following season, once the roots are well-established. The key is to harvest the buds when they are tender, before the outer leaves get stiff, since these plants are an edible form of thistles. If you do allow a bud to open up, the flower is a deep blue, and a boon to bees. The fully mature blossom, cut with a long stem and hung upside down to dry, also becomes a distinctive dried flower. I always think of artichokes as welcome visitors to our cool coastal clime from the sunny and warm Mediterranean.

During that week of 20F-degree weather in February of this year, I took the added precaution of putting a temporary covering of floating row cover over the still-standing stalks of artichokes, mostly as a barrier against the wind. They seem to have survived so far, particularly the purple variety Violetta de Provence, which is more susceptible to cold than the standard Green Globe, the variety commonly available locally. The Violetta has smaller, more conical heads, but a much finer taste and more tender leaves.

Asparagus

Of all the typical perennial vegetables, asparagus takes the longest to develop a good harvest, usually reaching that stage in the third year as the roots mature. But, to compensate for the long wait, the taste of the fresh-cut spears is extraordinarily sweet in comparison to the commercial bunches that have been shipped in from elsewhere. Resist the temptation to cut more than a few stalks the first two years and make sure the plot has a good supply of manure and compost, especially over the winter. I grow mostly a standard green variety; the purple type has not done as well so far.

Like artichokes, fresh asparagus is one of those vegetables that is a particular luxury. Maybe it is because they both are enjoyed with lots of melted butter. My asparagus bed is entering its fourth year and I am anticipating a steady supply. Finally, do let a good number of late-appearing stalks leaf to bushy maturity during the summer. The vegetation is needed to continue the cycle, allowing the roots to develop next year’s crop.

Cooking Note: if a few stalks do get too large and the bottom parts get a bit woody, use a vegetable peeler to remove the thick lower skin. The white inner pith will still be soft and edible, but just not that distinctive bright green of the more delicate upper spears.

A roundup of Over-wintering Hardy Vegetables

The January King cabbages offered small but tasty heads all winter, and are now sending up fresh side-sprouts from the cut stalks left in the ground. Two large collard plants did well all winter, sporting large healthy leaves seemingly impervious to frost. A sure sign of spring, the lacinato kale plants, like most hardy brassicas, are putting out multiple florets, an early version of broccoli. Keep the top-most buds trimmed off; they’ll be a steady supply of greens for fresh stir-fries. Other plants that did well included Mizuna and Purple mustard, Tat Tsoi bok choy, broccoli Raab, as well as Miner’s lettuce and a bushy form of arugula. Hiding under the leaves for a spring treat were Purple Top turnips, the roots unaffected by frost.

The brussels sprouts, however, suffered from the lack of winter cold, developing brown mold on the lower buds early on, and colonies of aphids on the topmost growing tips during any warm spell. What used to be a reliable crop now seems to be an extended challenge. I can understand a quote from a local farmer saying they are difficult to grow. Makes one appreciate the vast acres of purple and green brussels sprouts that are harvested in the valley just before Thanksgiving. Commercial sprouts would likely be non-organically grown, and unsweetened as yet by any touch of serious frost. I may stick to hardy cabbages as a more reliable winter brassica.

Leeks are the standard fresh allium in the winter garden. The main plot of leeks was harvested regularly, while two small beds of late-summer planted leeks are just now coming to maturity in March. The last of the leeks will develop a hard pith in the center as the temperature warms up, but the outer sheaths are still edible. As the green sprouts of the regular chives and garlic chives emerge in their pots in the kitchen garden, the fresh onion cycle begins again.

Peter Heffelfinger